Growing pains are a frequent derailer of our efforts to change, evolve and grow. If we allow it to, the inevitable discomfort that comes with stopping bad habits, taking a different approach to solving old problems or launching into a new phase can knock us off course. This, in turn, causes us to get stuck, backslide, sabotage ourselves and end up spinning in frustrating cycles.

This applies whether we’re trying to create and manage change in our businesses or our lives. At one end of the spectrum, companies trying to scale might find their employees freaking all the way out and pushing back hard in response to new systems and processes; at the other end, you might simply experience intense internal resistance to your efforts to eat more healthfully or get up earlier.

Experience has taught me that there are a number of ways we can deactivate the derailing potential of growing pains; ways that work no matter the size of the transformation-seeking entity or the scale of the sought-after change.

Here’s a handful:

1.  Understand that you only have three options. When you’re in a situation or experiencing circumstances that make you uncomfortable, you feel stuck or you crave to make a change, whatever that change is, there are really only three options available to you to resolve the distress.

You can:

1. leave the situation
2. change the situation, or
3. change the way you think and feel about the situation, accepting every single thing about it, soup to nuts.

Anything else you do – grumbling, analyzing ad nauseum, ruminating or bonding with others in misery, or repeatedly making false starts and leaving or changing, then turning right back to the status quo that made you miserable in the first place – is a guaranteed path to continued anxiety and upset. This is true whether the change you seek is to innovate a product or service that solves a problem in the marketplace or whether you want to stop smoking, quit your day job or pay off your debt.

Understanding your only three options can neutralize the rationalizations that are so tempting to engage in when growing pains strike.

2.  Abandon hope. Listen – if you have a reason to be hopeful that a situation is going to change on its own (a real reason, with a basis in fact, not a wish or a fantasy), then great. But much more often than not, the people who want a situation to change are the ones that are being negatively impacted by it.  Is the situation you want to change one in which someone else has been taking advantage or benefitting from their own poor behavior, to your detriment, despite your repeated efforts to talk with them about changing? (Think: the employee that is not pulling their weight, the abusive boss, the defiant kid, the spouse with a gambling addiction.)

If so, the chances that they will sense your upset and spontaneously make every effort to fix things are very, very slim.  Why would they? Things are great, from their perspective!

The Buddha said that attachments and expectations are at the root of all human suffering. And Oprah says that people are almost always trying to educate you about themselves via their behavior.  So, if you are in a distressing relationship or situation with someone who has resisted your entreaties to change, it might be time to get hopeless:

• Stop expecting them to be or do anything but who they are and what they do right now,
• Figure out what boundaries you need to create to care for yourself, your team members, your family, or the higher vision and
• Mind your own business. Impose reasonable boundaries and consequences for bad behavior, if that’s within the wheelhouse of your responsibilities. And, in any event, stop anything you’re doing to intervene between their bad behavior and its natural consequences, immediately.

Implement these boundaries with the full understanding that the person(s) at issue are likely to flip out, push back and otherwise act out in ways that will be uncomfortable or even painful to experience. But also know that this growing pains phase (a) doesn’t last forever, and (b) will last longer the more often you allow their discomfort to trump your new, healthy boundaries.

3.  Plan for uncharted post-change territory. Sometimes, the changes we make are to fix what’s broken. But at many critical junctures in our businesses and in our lives, the changes we need to make are to uplevel something that’s already functioning relatively well – to embark on a new venture or grow to a new scale. Counterintuitively, these can be some of the hardest changes to make, because of the core belief that seeking more makes us ungrateful for what we have, or the resistance of team members who feel like things are just fine as they are.

These upleveling changes also pose the spectre of unnecessary uncertainty and exposure to failure and rejection, all possibilities which often make us queasy and anxious right when we’re on the brink of clicking send or dropping the proposal into the mail. To neutralize these growing pains, it can be helpful to visualize yourself executing flawlessly in the face of the feelings of uncertainty and fear into the vision, and to build any skills that you can project will help you scale the predictable emotional obstacles of the uncharted territory into which you’re embarking.

I recently read that Michael Phelps visualized himself, thousands of times, keeping calm and carrying on to a world record and a gold medal in the event his goggles failed, a circumstance which would normally knock even the best swimmer off his or her game. So, when they did and he could not see, he was able to stay relaxed and swam to a world record-setting Olympic gold medal, precisely as he and his coach had planned.

4.  Get the unsaid said. In relationships, from teams to families, so much of the angst that comes with growth and change festers and turns into irreparable resentment and change-derailing resistance when people simply fail to communicate what they are thinking and feeling about the vision, the process or the other people involved in the change initiative. By getting the unsaid said, I mean getting these concerns out in the open – and not in gossipy, whispering silos, but all the way out in the open, so that valid concerns can be addressed and acted upon and so that mistaken perceptions can be addressed.

Putting structure and process to getting the unsaid said can seem silly, and feel like a waste of time and effort. But it is the only real way to make all parties feel respected and involved. And that, in turn, skyrockets the chances they will feel and become truly engaged in the campaign or effort to change (or at least stop trying to sabotage it).

5.  Minimize the risk of chaos and crises. So, so many change initiatives are derailed by crisis and chaos. You try to lose weight, then get a big tax bill in the mail that causes you to seek solace in sourdough and fall all the way off the wagon. Or you try to get to work earlier every day but seem to constantly run into delays by crises around what to wear or what to have for breakfast  – not to mention having your car break down due to the same thing that apparently made that light stay on for the 4 months prior.

I believe that these kinds of crises often reflect subconscious self-sabotage. Most are a long time in the making, and can be avoided with care and an investment of effort into problem areas or attention to brewing issues we’d probably prefer to avoid or ignore, hoping they’ll resolve on their own. The good news is that because they are truly predictable, if we pay attention, we have the ability to anticipate and solve for them before they knock us off course.

Completing open and overdue projects – even if that means killing and burying projects that aren’t working or eliminating staffing weak links – is key to clearing the slate for any new vision you want to create.  In the same vein, to avoid predictable crises, it is essential to create good habits and organizational routines in the areas of wellness and wealth (i.e., fitness, eating habits, bookkeeping, accounting, bill paying, income and expenses, etc.).  There’s a reason Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day; routinizing the musts of life frees up mental bandwidth so you can devote it to your projects and adventures.

6.  Rethink your growing pains: lean into them. Growing pains are often unavoidable, though you can anticipate and deactivate their derailing potential. Here’s a thought: what if we totally rethought what growing pains actually signify. Instead of seeing them as a sign we should turn around and undo whatever progress we have made, going back to the comfortable – if dysfunctional – status quo, what if we recognized that growing pains might actually be a signpost that we’re onto something?

What keeps us feeling emotional pain, and keeps us perceiving our growing pains as excruciating and intolerable, are our efforts to duck them, avoid them, slap band-aids on them, work around them and ignore them.

So, here’s my challenge: whatever it is that you want to change, consider in advance what’s likely to hurt about the change. What relationships could explode, what financial or other crises could erupt, what uncertainties will you encounter?  Do your best to anticipate and solve for these things, in advance.

But if and when you (or your organization) experiences growing pains anyway, don’t try to escape the feeling of discomfort at your growing pains. Lean into them, knowing that they could very well signal that something you’re doing is working to kill whatever it is about the status quo that you want or need to change.

Growing pains are simply the status quo dying, and the status quo dies hard.